Monday, July 17, 2017

Ride Beyond Vengeance (Columbia, 1966)

Second rate

Chuck Connors (left) was better known for his
TV work, most notably of course for The
Rifleman, which ran for five seasons on ABC, 1958 – 63, though he appeared
in many other Western TV shows too. But he did the occasional big-screen oater
as well, such as this mid-60s Columbia offering. The same may be said of director Bernard
McEveety, well known for shows such as Gunsmoke,
The Virginian, The Rebel, Cimarron Stripand so on, who also helmed the odd
feature movie (he’d done one with Chuck the year before). He didn’t quite get
the bigger picture. His bro Vincent (Firecreek)
did a better job.

Ride
Beyond Vengeance has a pretty standard (not to say
threadbare) revenge plot. Buffalo hunter Jonas Trapp, aka El Tigre (Connors) is
riding home to Coldiron, TX when he is set upon by three bad guys who brand him
on the chest, steal the $17,000 he had saved in the last eleven years, and
leave him for dead. Old-timer Paul Fix (there are other Rifleman cronies too) patches him up and of course once recovered, our hero
swears vengeance.

Paul Fixes him up

The villains are fancy-man
derringer-wielder Johnsy-Boy (Bill Bixby, well before he achieved Hulkhood),
half-crazed ranch foreman Coates (Western vet Claude Akins) and slightly more
respectable (though not really) banker Brooks Durham (Michael Rennie). Chuck
starts with Johnsy, branding him right back, and the fellow then shoots himself
(we are told, not shown). One down and two to go.

Banker Rennie

Jonas had married Jessie (Kathryn Hays) before
leaving but she wouldn’t go with him to hunt buffalo in Kansas (not
surprisingly: it’s set in 1894 and I don’t think there were too many buff
around by then). Now he comes back and equally unsurprisingly she doesn’t want
him. He stinks and anyway, she is engaged (thinking herself a widow) - to none
other than banker Durham.

She loves him, she loves him not, she loves him, oh hell, who cares?

Well, the plotline is tried and tested,
not to say hackneyed. And it pans out as we might expect for a bit. The only
real (minor) interest is whether Chuck will carry through his revenge plans to the end or
see the light and spare someone. There are too many minor characters all
over the place who confuse the issue. Screenplay author Andrew Fenady (future Chisum writer), who was adapting an Al
Dewlen novel, should have pruned them. The likes of Joan Blondell and Gloria
Grahame are wasted in parts that are not developed and there are too many
sub-plots.

Max Baer’s brother Buddy is the saloon
heavy. Chuck makes short work of him though. I’m glad he wasn’t pruned anyway.

Even the poster was poor

It’s one of those flashback movies. It
opens in 1966 in a restaurant with barman Arthur O’Connell (I always think he
looks like Frank Ferguson) telling census clerk James MacArthur the story, then
the screen goes all blurry, you know how they do, in case we viewers are too
dumb to understand it’s a flashback. So we see Chuck being branded and
then as he lies there it goes blurry once again and we get a flashfurtherback to
his courting of Jessie. Then it's fast forward again to 1894. At the end of the story we return to
the diner in 1966 and the clerk wondering if it wasn’t all just a tall tale as he
drives off. So there’s quite a lot of time travel with accompanying blurriness.

The buffalo hunter returns

Jonas is kind to his horse and strokes a
cat while Johnsy has been cruel to the poor puss. You don’t need to be Umberto
Eco to read the semiotics. All in all, though, Chuck is hardly the vengeful
Tiger he is supposed to be, being too Lucas McCainish to convince.

Bixby is Hulkishly mean to cat...

...while Tiger Chuck is much nicer (that's his adopted dad advising him on the left)

The saloon brawl is quite good and
creates a satisfactory amount of damage.

Though it seems pretty mild these days, it was all quite
violent for the time, in a fashionable mid-60s way that foreshadowed spaghettism,
but the trouble is that there isn’t much conviction in the cast. They appear to
be going through the motions. Only Akins comes alive a bit later on when he
becomes a drunk and slightly crazy, constantly talking to an imaginary friend
whom he calls Whiskey Man, but he then goes to the other extreme, hamming it
up.

Claude overdoes it

There are too many unconvincing studio
shots and almost no location shooting.

It got lousy reviews at the time and I
fear it hasn’t improved with age. If you skip it, dear e-pards, you won’t have
missed much.